Greetings! Faith And The City offers the information below for your review. Use the associated links to learn more about each topic. For information on a wider range of public issues, visit our home page at http://www.faithandthecity.org.

Are parents and students ready for more math and science?
Public Agenda Alert
Feb. 15, 2006
Business and political leaders, worried that U.S. schools aren't challenging enough, are launching major campaigns to improve math and science education. But when it comes to math and science education, parents and students think things are just fine, thank you.
Read more …

To: professor@university.edu subject: Why it's all about me
By Jonathan D. Glater
New York Times
Feb. 21, 2006
One student skipped class and then sent the professor an e-mail message asking for copies of her teaching notes. Another did not like her grade, and wrote a petulant message to the professor. Another explained that she was late for a Monday class because she was recovering from drinking too much at a wild weekend party.
Read more ...

Facts, values and the constitution
Public Agenda Alert
March 2, 2006
More Americans can name the characters in The Simpsons or the judges on American Idol than can name the five rights covered by the First Amendment, according to a survey released this week by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum.
Read more …

Public officials under God
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Washington Post
Feb. 28, 2006
When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he said some things about Catholic bishops that might, in today's climate, be condemned as insolence toward church authority.
Read more ...

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders urge Bush to make Israeli-Palestinian peace a priority
Press release
National Interreligious Leadership Initiative
for Peace in the Middle East
March 1, 2006
Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders, representing heads of 25 national organizations, met with Karen Hughes, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, to follow-up their appeal to President Bush to make Israeli-Palestinian peace an urgent priority for U.S. policy in the coming months.
Read more …

On torture and being "good Americans"
By Fred Branfman
Tikkun Magazine
Reprinted March 8, 2006
Bush's demand is unprecedented. No leader in all human history, not even Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, has publicly demanded the right to torture. All others have behaved as Bush did before the amendment when he secretly tortured on a scale unseen in American history even while saying he wasn't.
Read more …

Health costs projected to reach one-fifth of GDP
Public Agenda Alert
Feb. 23, 2006
A new federal report projects that by 2015, the United States will be spending one in every five dollars on health care. While health care spending isn't rising as fast as a few years ago, costs are still outstripping the overall growth in the economy.
Read more …

Better living through video games
By Carolyn Abraham
Globe and Mail
Feb. 9, 2006
A new study of 100 university undergraduates in Toronto has found that video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests. If they also happened to be bilingual, they were unbeatable.
Read more …

Can blogs revolutionize progressive politics?
By Lakshmi Chaudhry
In These Times
Feb. 8, 2006 (Posted by AlterNet)
Bloggers tout the rise of the netroots as changing how politics works, but will the internet just become a new method of conducting politics as usual?
Read more …

Congregations join Faith And The City to help families escape homelessness
Faith And The City
March 13, 2006
Homeless. It was a place Angie Aikens never expected to be. After all, she had worked steady since she was 18. And she was still working fulltime every day. But there she was, with her three teenagers, living in an emergency shelter at the United Methodist Children’s Home in Decatur.
Read more …

Negative perception of Islam increasing: Poll numbers in U.S. higher than in 2001
By Claudia Deane and Darryl Fears
Washington Post
March 9, 2006
As the war in Iraq grinds into its fourth year, a growing proportion of Americans are expressing unfavorable views of Islam, and a majority now say that Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Read more ...

Saving our democracy
By Bill Moyers
AlterNet
Feb. 27, 2006
In the words of Louis Brandeis, one of the greatest of our Supreme Court justices: "You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy, but you cannot have both." As great wealth has accumulated at the top, the rest of society has not been benefiting proportionally. In 1960 the gap between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Now it is 75 fold.
Read more …

Stretched to limit, women stall march to work
By Eduardo Porter
New York Times
March 2, 2006
For four decades, the number of women entering the workplace grew at a blistering pace, fostering a powerful cultural and economic transformation of American society. But since the mid-1990's, the growth in the percentage of adult women working outside the home has stalled, even slipping somewhat in the last five years and leaving it at a rate well below that of men.
Read more …

Why I am a Christian (sort of)
By Robert Jensen
AlterNet
March 10, 2006
I don't believe in God. I don't believe Jesus Christ was the son of a God that I don't believe in, nor do I believe Jesus rose from the dead to ascend to a heaven that I don't believe exists. Given these positions, this year I did the only thing that seemed sensible: I formally joined a Christian church.
Read more ...

Not heard from the pulpit
By Tom Ehrich
USA Today
March 14, 2006
Preachers and Sunday school teachers are pulling their punches these days regarding morality. Our nation needs ethical and religious instruction in the basics: honesty, fidelity, humility, sharing wealth, sharing power and sacrifice.
Read more ...

Faith And The City posts brief event notices that must include a website address for additional information. Events should be concerned with public issues
and/or civic dialogue.

March 17: “The left hand of God: Taking back our country from the religious right.” Book tour by Rabbi Michael Lerner comes to Atlanta.
Read more …

March 24-25: "Theology and Public Policy: The Role of the Church in the Public Policy Debate." Presented by The Interdenominational Theological Center and the Joseph E. Lowery Institute for Justice and Human Rights.

March 29: “Speaking up for rights.” 2006 Alonzo L. McDonald Lecture on Christian Jurisprudence. Emory University Center for the Study of Law and Religion. Presented by Nicholas P. Wolterstorff.
Read more …

April 5: “The gap between being a witness to your faith and proselytizing.” Faith Alliance of Metro Atlanta (FAMA).
Read more …

The Faith And The City e.Newsletter is offered free of charge. It is designed primarily for members of the diverse community of faith throughout Atlanta's 20-county metropolitan region, but subscriptions are available to all.